There’s never a weekend that I am not excited about as a driver in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series. But there are a few weekends that have me even more excited, and one of those weekends is coming up at Auto Club Speedway for Sunday’s running of the Auto Club 400.

I remember years ago when it wasn’t much fun to watch a race at Auto Club Speedway because of single-lane racing. But that’s way in the past. The Southern California facility has developed into a great racetrack over the years and is the host of one of the best races of the season. If you saw last year’s race there, then you know what I am talking about.

Why the big difference from single lane to three-lane racing? The track surface has more wear and we can run all over the place. It is still a really difficult racetrack because it’s bumpy, rough and eats the tires off the car so fast.

You’re talking about a two-mile track going at a speed of 210 miles per hour with worn-out tires into a banked corner. Not having the maximum grip at that kind of speed is a handful, to say the least, but a whole lot of fun to race on.

You also have more options at Auto Club Speedway because of it being super-duper wide. It’s probably the widest track we go to, five times wider than Bristol Motor Speedway, where we raced at last week. I’m anxious to see what our Furniture Row/Denver Mattress Chevrolet can do on that surface.

Speaking of our race car, it hasn’t been the start of the season that we had counted on. If you look at where we sit in the point standings after four races (29th), one would assume that we’ve been struggling. No so. The truth is our Furniture Row Chevys have had the speed to run up front except probably for Phoenix, where we finished 22nd.

But this isn’t a sport about where you start or where you’re at in the middle of the event. It’s all about where you finish. We’ve had some mechanical and other issues that have been costly, knocking us out of top-10 or better in three of the first four races. We need to get this fixed to show our Furniture Row fans that we are indeed a Chase-contending team.

We can’t change what happened the past four weeks, but we can learn from what has happened. And right now the focus is all about California and nailing down a solid starting spot during Friday’s qualifying session.

Martin Truex Jr. is the driver of the No. 78 Chevrolet for Furniture Row Racing. It’s his first year for the Denver-based team.